RPG Jamboree: Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millennium Girl (3DS)

In a first-person dungeon crawler, a good map can be the difference between frustrated repetitive wandering and informed and manageable exploration, but Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millennium Girl puts the map-making in your hands, an initially intimidating prospect. Having to draw out the map yourself on the touch screen sounds daunting at first, but once you do begin to fill in the first floors of the labyrinth, soon you start to recognize the genius in putting this in the player’s hand. In most games a dead end would be a waste of time, but now it is vital knowledge for you to add to your growing understanding of the dungeon, the cartography making you focus much more on the layout of this role-playing game’s labyrinth than if you were only interested in finding treasures, bosses, and the way to the next floor.

 

The labyrinth of Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millennium Girl is thankfully not just a series of interior spaces, it somehow containing plenty of natural locations split into strata. On first entering you’ll already find the first set of floors make up a lush forest and later you can even encounter unusual locations like floors that almost look like the ocean floor, so despite plunging deeper underground during your quest, the abnormal dungeon near the town of Etria has more to share than brick walls and dirt. Technically, the player is allowed to focus solely on trying to find important objectives like the staircase to the next floor, but with the empty map on the bottom screen they’ll likely come across the other areas of note along the way. Most floors contain things like gathering points to acquire special materials you can sell to a woman back in town for access to more gear or you might find events where you’ll get a choice of action that can lead to some helpful mid-exploration healing or potentially a dangerous encounter. With there even being requests in town for specific knowledge of the maze that pay out with some incredibly high boosts to your experience points for leveling up, it becomes prudent to make an informed and detailed map just in case those little details become tomorrow’s big payoff.

The bottom screen in Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millennium Girl is devoted almost purely to the map, it remaining open even when you enter battle just in case you needed to mark something down before you were interrupted by monsters. There are auto-mapping options available, the player able to set it so it fills in spots you walked in, but even with these on, a lot of vital information must still be added by hand. Whether it be the location of things like the gathering points and special events or simply where doors and shortcuts can be found, it still pays to draw on your map even if you were too intimidated to mark every tile manually. More interestingly, as you get deeper into the labyrinth, more floors start to feature aspects that would be hard to remember but the map gives you a way to mark them to help yourself when you revisit the area. You may end up teleporting around a confusing floor or riding flowers to reach small islands, but with the range of icons and markers on the bottom screen you can clearly indicate how these things connect to help sort out how to get where you want to go. Perhaps the most crucial part of making an informed map though is the fact that you can teleport right to the entrance or exit stairs for a floor once you’ve made a sufficiently detailed map, this heavily speeding up your ability to return to past locations or get right back to where you left off after you took a trip back to town to regroup, grab more quests, and sell and purchase items at the store.

 

Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millennium Girl is a remake of the first Etrian Odyssey game that originally released on the DS, and much of that game is still found within this title’s Classic Mode. Classic Mode allows you to build a party of adventurers to your own liking, different job classes providing different benefits in battle. An alchemist relies heavily on elemental magic attacks, a hexer is good at weakening enemy monsters, and a medic serves as an obvious source for recovery, and with the way the game handles skills for each class, there are actually some informed level up choices to be made. You get a skill point for every level a character earns and these are spent in their small associated skill tree. You will sometimes need to invest in simple things like increasing a stat like defense or attack to access new techniques, but you might find it more prudent to pursue passive skills first so you can build up extra benefits your party has in the game’s turn-based battle system. Equipment purchases can also feel similarly important since even if you face down every foe you encounter you’ll still often find the store has more good gear than you can buy, and with some weapons like the staves you might be choosing between attack power or magical benefits based on what you want the wielder to focus on. Adding a little more customization to the affair are Grimoire Stones, these randomly acquired from battle and containing special moves from either the monsters you face or other job classes. A character can equip a stone to access powers they might otherwise have no access to, so if you need some back-up healing or only have a few good attacks you like from a class, there is hope to diversify a character’s role a bit if you’re lucky with these drops.

Story Mode is essentially the same as Classic Mode in many ways save for three key differences. The obvious one is the injection of a true plot, the player given more to chew on than simply plunging into the labyrinth to learn its secrets. This is where the second change arises, the game giving you a set of five consistent party members over the course of the adventure that make for a balanced party and provide some personality to the affair. Your little band of heroes isn’t too deeply realized, but there are still some elements of their background and personality that make seeing their reactions to mid-dungeon events more meaningful than a blank slate and some have amusing details like your group’s protector Raquna coming from Ontario, which despite this setting with original fantasy concepts and settings does line up a lot with the real Canadian province. There is a bit more drama to be found in having a group of characters who can better interact with the supporting cast and villains, but perhaps the most substantial addition even for people who care most about the gameplay would be in the extra dungeon, Gladsheim. A futuristic yet ancient dungeon, this is where you encounter the Millennium Girl known as Frederica and begin to touch on a mystery surrounding the purpose of the labyrinth. With extra floors to explore and unique bosses and enemies, Gladsheim ends up a place you drop by now and again as the story unfolds and injects an additional bit of variety into the adventure’s shape. Notably it does seem like the game is built around this area so Classic Mode players might find adventuring a bit rougher due to the exclusion of Gladsheim’s chances to further level up, so it does feel like Story Mode is the intended way to play with Classic being there as a means of getting more out of the game after the plot wraps up. Unfortunately, you can only have one save file, so it ends up being a choice between modes that can’t easily be swapped between. On the bright side though, the game’s remastered soundtrack is superb, the instrumentation sometimes rather strong for mundane situations but it certainly adds some life to exploration and simple tasks like sorting your stuff out back in Etria.

 

For the battles themselves, Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millennium Girl actually includes a very nice approach to random encounters. While wandering around the dungeons, a circle on the top screen will change colors from green to yellow to red to indicate when the next monster battle will occur. Each step will lead to this indicator’s color deepening, but if you stand still you have the time to pop open the menu and heal up or whatever else you might want to do before entering a fight. There are a wide range of monsters to be found throughout the labyrinth and Gladsheim and some do have unique attack types so not all of them are going to be quick skirmishes you can clear with your basic attacks, and a bit more interestingly, killing monsters with certain moves can earn you rarer materials. Usually a new floor’s foes will have some enemies that initially make you sit up and take notice, especially if they have abilities that can bind your characters to lock up their techniques or ways to confuse them or spook them to mess up their ability to attack. It can sometimes feel like, at most, one character like the alchemist should whip out their special moves while the others can relax, but the regular monsters aren’t the real dangers of the dungeon. Most floors will have creatures called FOEs, this short for Field On Enemies to represent the fact they too are often wandering about the dungeon. When you reach a floor, the FOEs on it are often far too powerful to take down or you can just barely squeak by with smart use of all your skills, but really the FOEs moving around out in the open are meant to make you consider your movement more carefully. Adjusting your routes to find valid safe paths forward becomes key to avoiding these difficult encounters, but they can also join into regular monster battles if they’re close by so you even need to account for that threat radar you have. FOEs can give even a straightforward floor new texture especially once they start becoming smarter and might actively pursue you or force you towards hazards like shifting sand or thorns. The traditional bosses still pack a punch, but the FOEs are what give the exploration more zest and the map-making more purpose.

THE VERDICT: Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millennium Girl puts together a lot of its ideas well, creating a need for making maps not just in floor gimmicks but the powerful FOEs that nail in the importance of the task. Exploration feels richer because of this element, and with some excellent music even in its quieter sections, it’s easy to remain committed to the task rather than finding it tedious. While the battles can start to blend together a bit despite the rich customization options and the story feels like it could have spent a little more time building up the characters, the fights still can hit you with a good test of your abilities and the characters do become endearing and add some more weight to certain reveals and events.

 

And so, I give Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millennium Girl for Nintendo 3DS…

A GOOD rating. Perhaps because the story was placed over the areas from the original Etrian Odyssey, Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millennium Girl doesn’t feel like it gets to dive in deep enough to its main cast to really bring the emotional moments to their maximum potential. Frederica is thankfully heavily supported by the addition of Gladsheim and her story ends up the most meaningful to follow, but the broader party feels like it could have brought her personal growth home if they had more time spent exploring who they are and providing some similar emotional obstacles to overcome. It still does give more weight to certain encounters and a sense you want to see these heroes succeed, the plot more than sufficient to justify its additions and still not distracting too much from the dungeon crawling and map making for those who might see that as the main appeal. Having the more curated experience still have a good range of customization options thanks to the skill learning system and Grimoire Stones keeps you invested in their growth even if Classic contains the more robust tools for tailoring a group for battle, but the FOEs might be the true star. The map-making would lose it luster if all it was useful for was marking some places you can gather materials or the small events each floor offers, but it being a tool to help navigate around the FOEs nails in its necessity while your tools for drawing remain flexible enough you don’t feel like you bumble into inescapable danger too often. On Normal difficulty you are given a free revive if you die, although it only works once per dungeon visit to still add some weight to encounters, but you can also get ways to speedily leave a dungeon if you do get cornered or low on resources. The ability to teleport to staircases also makes the exploration of this massive labyrinth feel manageable, and that’s where this game rises above something like Shining in the Darkness where the conveniences weren’t in place and too much time was spent just throwing yourself against monsters to get strong enough for the next set. In Story mode the progress feels well paced to bring you to new areas and let you avoid too much repetition.

 

The ideas behind dungeon exploration like making your own map and avoiding FOEs mean Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millennium Girl isn’t a run of the mill dungeon crawling RPG and it can get pretty far on the strength of these elements alongside the new story and upgraded music. A few floors might be a bit irritating with their gimmickry, but for the most part it’s easy to get into the groove of pushing forward, marking down what you find, and making the return trips to town to redeem the fruits of your labors before plunging back in. While the story could have dug deeper to make the adventure feel more personally meaningful, Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millennium Girl handles its combat and exploration well while still making the added story elements worth paying attention to, its ideas never too weak to justify their presence.